Sports and “Sports”

I’ve been watching some of the Olympics this week (despite the fact that I think the USA probably should have boycotted them), and thinking about the nature of the competitions.

One thing I’ve noticed – and I’m not saying this is a particularly startling insight on my part – is that the sports can, for the most part, be divided into two categories. There’s the ones where you win by earning points, or runs, or whatever, through your own actions, and there’s the ones where you win by convincing judges to give you points. Examples of the former would be, say, baseball or soccer or tennis or the 100 meter dash or something like that; examples of the latter would be stuff like gymnastics, diving, synchronized swimming.

Now, is it just me, or is there something seriously wrong with the latter type of “sport”? I’m not sure they even deserve to be called “sports”. Sports are supposed to be tests of the athletic skill of the competitors. The competitors in gymnastics, diving, etc, are athletes, certainly, but it seems to me that these so-called sports are not testing their athletic skill – they’re testing their ability to convince the judges to give them points. This leaves the ultimate responsibility for determining the winner in the hands of the judges, not the hands of the competitors.

Which means that ideology-related bias (I could easily see a judge from the US not giving high marks to a gymnast from China because those two countries are seen as adversaries), home-field advantage (it seems to just be acknowledged fact at these Olympic games that the Chinese have an advantage in judged “sports” because the roar of the crowd is louder for their athletes, making them seem more impressive), and pure whim play much too large a role.

And don’t try to tell me that the way the judges determine the scores is in some way scientific and they are just applying a set of simple rules to what they see. Even if that is in theory the case, it is clearly not the case in real life – a sport where one judge can give a 10.0 and another an 8.5 to the same dive, for example, cannot be based on objective observation of what happened.

Still, you do have sports that are kind of on the border – I don’t know much about boxing, and so am not sure if it falls into the sports or “sports” category, and while it seems like wrestling is objective, there are apparently judged involved to determine when exactly to award a point. And even with sports like baseball or football or soccer, you have umpires or referees who have an influence on the game even though they are on neither team.

But I don’t think this is the same thing. With calling balls and strikes in baseball, for example, the umpire does have to make the call, but he is saying that an event happened a certain way. He is making a call about facts. With judged sports, they are not making calls about facts, they are translating their opinions into a pseudo-scientific scoring system. They are not saying “this dive was worth 8.5 points and anyone who disagrees with me is in error”, they are saying, “oh, let’s see, he did X, Y and Z well but messed up on W a bit… let’s give him an 8.5, that sounds about right”. And different judges can come to different conclusions, and give different point values, and this is seen as acceptable, even perhaps a good thing.

Good thing, bad thing, I don’t care – but it does make it, in my opinion, not a sport.

It would be interested to see what would happen to the Olympics if all of these “sports” were taken out, though. Most people probably wouldn’t watch if the Olympics consisted only of track and field and swimming and soccer and stuff like that. But it would be more of a contest of pure athletic skill. It would also probably result in the US beating China in the Olympic medal count; right now the US has more medals total, but the Chinese more golds, but I suspect this is largely a result of the Chinese winning in the judged “sports” (IIRC they swept men’s gymnastics, and diving too, and did really well in the women’s of both those sports too) – if you take those out, the US probably wins by a hefty margin. I don’t know, though; the US probably has a lot of medals in those sports too, after all.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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One Response to Sports and “Sports”

I don’t think it’s a difference between sports and “sports” so much as a difference between competitive (for want of a better word) and artistic sports. Competitive sports are more or less objective; if you get to the finish line first, you win. If you score more goals, you win. It’s pretty cut-and-dry. The artistic sports are up to judges’ discretion, sure, but just because the outcomes of these events aren’t so objective doesn’t make them less valid as sports. It just proves that there’s subjectivity in the world whether we like it or not. Often, the competitive sports aren’t as objective as they seem- maybe an umpire makes a call about a fact, but he doesn’t always have the facts straight. In hockey, for instance, you’ll never see a game where a ref doesn’t call an unfair penalty or three, or blink at the wrong moment and not see a player hook the guy who had the puck and was just about to shoot. I’ve even seen them invalidate goals that were CLEARLY in. A ref/umpire/what have you does makes a call based on the way he saw the event happen- but that’s exactly what judges do in gymnastics. Umpires and judges have the same amount of opportunity to change outcomes by fudging things, accidentally or otherwise. The only “pure” sports, really, are the time-based ones like track and swimming. In the end, life ain’t fair, but the way I see it, that’s what makes it interesting. In any event, gymnastics is fun to watch, so why drop it from sports?